Imaginative space and the construction of community, the drama of Augustine's two cities in the English Renaissance

by Minton, Gretchen E.

Abstract (Summary)

This thesis traces the development of Augustine's paradigm of the two cities (the
City of God and the earthly city) in the cultural poetics of the English Renaissance.
Although scholars have studied the impact of Augustine's mode1 on theology, historical
consciousness, and political theones in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, little attention
has been paid to the genealogy of the more specifically "literary" aspects of the idea of
the two cities. My line of inquiry is the relationship between Augustine's rnodel of the
two cities and the idea of drama. More specifically, this project explores the ways in
which the idea of the two cities spoke to various cornmunities-of readers, of
worshippers, and ultirnately, of playgoers.
Augustine's view of drama is divided; on the one hand, he speaks at length about
the evil influence of Roman spectacles, but on the other hand, he acknowledges that the
world itself is a theatre for God's cosmic drama. However, this employment of drama is
limited in Augustine's writing, because his greater cornmitment is to the idea of
Scripture. This interplay between drama and Scripture, 1suggest, is an integral part of
the two-cities model that is related to his theology of history.
The tension between the idea of drama and the idea of the book is evident in
English Reformation appropriations of Augustine's model, such as those of John Bale
and John Foxe, who changed the terminology to "the two churches." The second section
of my thesis shows how these Reformers contained their own "dramatic" adaptations of
the two cities within an even narrower theatre than Augustine' s-a theatre constituted
and contained by the Word.
Shiftingthe focus to secular drama, the final section concems Shakespeare's use
of some facets of the two-cities mode1 in his Jacobean plays, and examines the effects of
removing this constmct frorn its religious context. The result, 1argue, is a theatre that
celebrates its own aesthetic power and flaunts its sheer physicality, resisting the
presumed stability of the written word.